We're still a few days away from the official unveiling of MX100 solid state drive but thanks to a distributor jumping the gun we already have the full scoop on Crucial's latest creation. As previously revealed, the MX100 is set to be the first SSD equipped with Micron's 16 nm MLC NAND flash memory but not all models will have the 16 nm NAND - the 128 GB drive will pack 20 nm chips, while the 256 GB and 512 GB versions will have 16 nm flash.

All three MX100 drives come in a 7 mm-thick 2.5-inch chassis (a 9.5 mm adapter is included), and have a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, a Marvell 88SS9189 controller, and are backed by a three-year warranty.

Because i have a 2TB HDD and it's enough. If i'd go SSD i'd go completelly or i'm not going to. Currently i have 2TB HDD paired with 32GB ReadyCache. Better than having stuff installed on some tiny SSD that i have to shuffle around to use it.

I guess there is some advantage to store in one huge SSD, without no backup... cuz you do not have to deal with that backup when that SSD passes away ;)
I know my self - and 80% of my terabytes are movies that I never will watch again - it is nonsence for me to spend extra hundreds of $ to save them on SSD (just so I can load them 10 seconds faster - after all - that is a crappy movie that will waste a 1,5hours of my life, so I do not mind those few second for coppying from HDD to SSD, same with a crappy game .iso - it will waste hours of my life till I will get to conclusion: "uninstall that crap.... and never again!!!!" - so also there those few second of coppying over does not count ). for TeraBytes of crap to store HDD still rocks

More likely the use of 20nm flash is because the 128GB drive is using 64Gb die, and the 64Gb die are only made at 20nm. Remember that the more die you have the faster the SSD since operations can be parallelized (think RAID 0).

I guess Crucial decided that you need a minimum of 16 die for acceptable performance. If you were to use 128Gbit die in a 128GB SSD, that would mean only 8 die and therefore a slow SSD. It's the same as what Crucial did with the M550 to make sure that the low capacity drives still had acceptable performance.

TheBrainyOne said:Who in their right mind would buy the 128 GB model just to save 25 Euros??!!

See the point above. They likely have to use 20nm 64Gbit die to maintain acceptable performance in the 128GB drive. In that case, 16 128Gbit chips at 16nm is likely not much more expensive than 16 64Gbit chips at 20nm thus reducing the cost difference between the 128GB and 256GB drives.

The Von Matrices said:More likely the use of 20nm flash is because the 128GB drive is using 64Gb die, and the 64Gb die are only made at 20nm. Remember that the more die you have the faster the SSD since operations can be parallelized (think RAID 0).

I guess Crucial decided that you need a minimum of 16 die for acceptable performance. If you were to use 128Gbit die in a 128GB SSD, that would mean only 8 die and therefore a slow SSD. It's the same as what Crucial did with the M550 to make sure that the low capacity drives still had acceptable performance.

See the point above. They likely have to use 20nm 64Gbit die to maintain acceptable performance in the 128GB drive. In that case, 16 128Gbit chips at 16nm is likely not much more expensive than 16 64Gbit chips at 20nm thus reducing the cost difference between the 128GB and 256GB drives.

Thats can't be true at all, becase m500 120GB is using 128Gbit dies already and already hits ~130MB/s with only 8 dies. So it's kinda pointless to think they would need 16 dies to hit 150MB/s, considering m550 128GB hits 350MB/s with that configration :)

None of Crucial's SSD's (e.g. M4, M500, M550), that I can remember have ever had fast write speeds. They aren't really going for the speed demon award, and so don't compete with the high-speed market. Even with their RAM, Crucial has always been that day in and day out dependable piece of equipment. They've kind of built their hallmark on long term reliability and durability with just above average performance.

Other than 840PRO, m550 has the fastest write speeds on 120/128GB ssd.

You need to understand, that crucial isn't using any nasty tricks like compression or turbowrite (or nCache in case of sandisk). Write speeds on m500 is actually comparable to 840EVO, once you take away turbowrite.

Sandforce drives are league on its own. Their write speeds usually sux aswell, they just look good on paper (due to compression).

And not that write speed matters much anyway. Bulk of workload on client ssds is read anyway.

The Von Matrices said:More likely the use of 20nm flash is because the 128GB drive is using 64Gb die, and the 64Gb die are only made at 20nm.

I guess Crucial decided that you need a minimum of 16 die for acceptable performance. If you were to use 128Gbit die in a 128GB SSD, that would mean only 8 die and therefore a slow SSD. It's the same as what Crucial did with the M550 to make sure that the low capacity drives still had acceptable performance.

Small file writes are sent to the nCache to keep performance high, and idle time garbage collection likely dumps the nCache out to the much larger MLC array. The nCache was typically used as a way around having to use DRAM for data structure storage, but in the case of the Ultra Plus you get both: nCache + DRAM. I’m not sure there’s enough of an nCache in the Ultra Plus to make a big enough difference to justify the decision in this case.

nCache (as you could see from the anandtechs review) is intended for small writes, rather than big sequential writes, thats why its way smaller (~1GB). But sandisk is using pretty fast flash and 64Gbit dies, so write speeds don't suffer. It still makes it similar to turbowrite (pseudo SLC mode) just isn't used for all the writes.